SAO PAULO: Eight people were killed on Saturday when a hot air balloon carrying 21 passengers caught fire in southern Brazil, said the governor of Santa Catarina state, where the incident occurred.

“Eight fatalities and 13 survivors,” governor Jorginho Mello said on X.

Videos taken by bystanders and carried on Brazilian television showed the moment when the balloon erupted in flames above the coastal town of Praia Grande. The weather conditions were clear.

The basket carrying the passengers plummeted dozens of metres to the ground in flames.

“We still have no information” about the condition of the survivors, a spokeswoman for Santa Catarina firefighters said. Praia Grande, on the Atlantic coast, is a popular destination for hot-air ballooning in Brazil.

The survivors were being treated in area hospitals, firefighters said.

An investigation was launched to determine the cause of the accident.

“I want to express my solidarity with the families of the victims,” Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in a statement.

The pilot told officials that the fire was sparked by a blowtorch in the basket, Tiago Luiz Lemos, a police official in Praia Grande, told local media.

The pilot tried to bring the balloon down as soon as the fire erupted, “and once it was close to the ground, he told the passengers to jump from the basket. But some of them couldn’t do it and the fire grew,” the official said.

One witness told a newspaper that he saw “two people falling, they were on fire, the basket broke off and the balloon fell”. It was the second fatal balloon accident in the country in just a few days.

Published in Dawn, June 22nd, 2025